Jacob Church
MFA ’25 Photography
Photographing in American towns, I pose questions about the complicated relationship between community and individualism, and how our built environment serves as a sort of language, communicating at once its community’s values, desires, and disenfranchisement. Often feeling detached yet defined by my identity as a working class American, I use the camera as a tool to create dialogue between what’s pictured and myself. Throughout all my bodies of work is an attempt to evaluate my relationship to American histories and cultures.
My ongoing project Loon combines observation and memoir. Photographing in New England, I trace recollections of my childhood against the contemporary condition of a region widely associated with early American history. I see this condition on the surfaces of buildings, painted on cars, and in the faces of strangers on the street. This work is about a kind of harmony where mundane places, people, and things radiate a similar melancholic bliss. If there is a through line or a certain kind of beauty, it’s one of love tethered to discontent, tenderness in rough places, and unconscious longing. I hope to create with these images a sort of constellation of self. One that walks through many different moments and spaces as a means to question notions of memory, familiarity and home.
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Jacob Church is a photographer born in Bowling Green, Ohio. He is currently a graduate candidate in photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His photographic practice explores the intersection between self and place. Shot on film, Church’s images are exposed and kept in the dark for sometime, creating space between the fiction of the occurrence as it lives in his memory and the fact of the latent image. His work has been exhibited at Panopticon gallery in Boston, MA and at La Grange in Vers Pont du Gard, France. His photographs have been featured in Pearl Press, Oranbeg Press, Color Tag Magazine, Lenscratch, and Fotofilmic.
